2010 Two Pounds

Two different £2 coins were issued in 2010. A commemorative to mark 150 years of modern nursing and the centenary of the death of Florence Nightingale and the standard coin with the ages of man reverse.

The obverse has the portrait of the Queen by Ian Rank-Broadley. This commemorative £2 coins omits the date on its reverse, so this has been incorporated into the obverse and is shown at the bottom as ‘2010’.

The reverse is by Gordon Summers and shows nurses hands feeling for a pulse. Florence Nightingale, named after Florence, where she was born in 1820, was in charge of nurses at the 1853-56 Crimean war and later went on to establish a nursing school in London:

The obverse portrait of the Queen by Ian Rank-Broadley has been used on all UK coinage from 1998 to 2015 and is the fourth portrait of the Queen used on coinage. At the time of writing, this portrait is due to be replaced by a new one, to be unveiled in 2015.

The reverse design shows the ages of man. Represented are the Iron Age, the Industrial Revolution, the Electronic Age and the Internet Age. The edge quote ‘STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS’ is from a letter by Sir Isaac Newton from 1676 in which he wrote: ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’, which may have been a modest nod to other scientists, but some say that it may have been poking fun at the stature of the recipient of the letter, Robert Hooke. The expression ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ pre-dates Newton by many centuries:

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